Smile
by DarkBlaziken
Summary: FE6. The performer must always smile, even if she is in pain; for she smiles to make others smile. Oneshot. Warning: one-sided pairings, melodrama, and angst.


**A/N:** So I guess this is dedicated to _canadians princess_, since she was the one who sort of gave me the idea. Following her advice on Arranged Marriage, I've decided to write a fic about, as she puts it, "how Lalum or Dorothy would react." I don't know enough about Dorothy and I don't really like her, but Lalum is an intriguing character, with an interesting personal history and all.

Personally, I don't exactly ship Lalum/Percival (I prefer to think of the interactions between these two as friendship XD) but I've decided to venture a onesided Lalum/Percival this time. It's not my first time doing a pairing I don't really ship, so I hope it's fine.

Warning: three cheers for melodrama. Hip Hip hooray.

* * *

_The performer must always smile, even when she is in pain._

If her duty as a performer was to smile, then, she decided, the duty of an Etrurian general was probably to keep a straight face forever.

For that was how it was when they had first met at her foster father's (or just father, as she preferred to think) house: it had been an almost one-sided conversation; she was smiling and chattering away, and there he stood, impassive, expression unchanging, answering her in succinct, unelaborated sentences.

And that was how it was when they had met on the battlefield, when she had been sent to persuade him to join the Alliance Army with the prince's seal: that same detached look, that same laconic mannerism; the look on his face never seemed to change, save for a flicker of surprise through his eyes upon seeing the prince's letter. A flicker, and no more; the next moment, he had returned to that reticent state, saying only four words: _I will join you._ Then it was over, with none of the struggle, none of the drama she had imagined.

* * *

_There was a resounding crack of a whip against stone followed by the stern voice of her troupe leader. "Again! And for Elimine's sake, Lalum, put a smile on that dreary face!"_

"_B-but my ankle hurts! How can I smile when my ankle burns every time I try to put my weight on it?"_

"_Nonsense, Lalum! I don't care about how you ankle feels, the audience doesn't care about how your ankle feels, so you can't let it affect the smile on your face!"_

"_B-but—"_

"_No more buts! You are a performer, Lalum. Do you know what being a performer means? It means you have to smile, even if you are in pain or discomfort. You perform to make others feel happy. If the performer herself does not appear happy, how can the audience smile at her performance?"_

* * *

_The performer smiles to make others smile._

She was confident that one day, she would make him smile, too.

* * *

She had tried everything: dances, songs, jokes, praises, even special wake-up dances and her power lunch, but nothing seemed to have worked, nothing seemed to be able to elicit that elusive smile, nothing seemed to change that stoicism about him. There might have been a hint of amusement or a trace of sheer incomprehension in his eyes, but never were there even the faintest beginnings of a smile on his face.

Had his facial muscles already forgotten how to move_,_ she wondered.

Perhaps, she sometimes thought to herself, I should stop trying. After all, what was the point in trying to make someone who had forgotten how to make facial expressions smile? What really was the point in trying so hard just so that she could see the corners of his lips curve up on that stolid face?

Why was she even still trying?

Yet, whenever those questions popped up in her head, they were dismissed quickly. She had no answers for them, no logical explanation for what she was doing, but still she refused to stop attempting, refused to heed that bubble of thought which time and again would come to her on a whim, but would never be taken seriously.

She never stopped trying to make him smile, and she did not know why.

* * *

_If keeping a face devoid of any emotion forever was hard, then keeping a smile forever is even harder._

She had not intended to eavesdrop, but, seemingly inevitably, she had spied the two of them conversing quietly with one another away from the rest of the army.

It was a whole lot of politics, politics of the kind her father was very much involved in, but had never really inspired much interest in her. Diplomacy, self-preservation, negotiation, autonomy, those were but fanciful, meaningless words to her. Soon she found her attention slipping away, and she would have left if not for the sudden smile that appeared on his face.

She lost track of what they had said afterwards; the only thought that filled her head now was that he had smiled, that rare smile that she had never managed to evoke in him, no matter what she did. And now, he had smiled—so easily, so naturally, as though he had known how to smile all his life—but it was not directed at her. In all his interactions with her, he had never been anything but glacial—never had he been so relaxed, so unguarded, almost benign. And yet, he had smiled at _her._ Something dark and poisonous—was it envy? Wrath? Betrayal?—crept stealthily into her veins, and soon it was coursing through her body, infiltrating her mind, and she almost longed to run out and reveal herself and tear _her_ into bits. How could _she _have made him smile so easily? What was it about _her_ that could make him let that scrupulously guarded mask fall away so easily?

And then, as suddenly as it had come, the venom was gone.

Then there came acceptance, acceptance that she could never make him smile no matter how hard she tried; but together with that acceptance came the feeling of something breaking. Something deep inside her shattered, like glass against stone. First a crack along the point of impact, then it slowly widened, branched into thousands of irregular, angular lines, finally bursting into a thousand fragments, each and every of these shards piercing into something inside her, seemingly causing excruciating pain, yet intangible, imaginary, impossible.

For the first time since very, very long ago, the smile on her face faltered and died.

* * *

_The performer's emotions do not belong to her._

"You're not going?"

Her father observed her anxiously, and he had good reason to do so; she had not smiled ever since she had seen him smile. Perhaps her smile had been transferred to him. Perhaps the part of her which knew how to smile had died with his smile. She did not know, and she did not want to know.

The wedding invitation lay there innocently, plainly unaware of the pains that had been caused by it, the tears that had been shed because of it. It was immensely tempting, all of a sudden, to pick up that silver-trimmed piece of parchment and rip it into shreds. But she contained the impulse, and instead stared back at her father, a dull, almost bored look on her face.

"No," she said flatly.

Understanding, finally, seemed to flash through her father's worried face. He relaxed somewhat, or at least she thought he did, until she realized that he was now regarding her forlornly.

"My poor child," he murmured, reaching out to touch her face and wipe away the tears which had sprung unnoticed from her eyes and were now tracing a trail down her cheek. She turned away, unwilling to let him comfort her, to say those words she already knew he would say. But he said them anyway.

"It is time to let go, my dear girl. Forget it. Forget it all. Pretend that you've never met him." He stood up, sighed and left, but before he did, he patted her gently on her shoulders, causing fresh tears to spill out of her eyes again.

She blamed herself for not knowing how to play chess. If she had known how to do so, perhaps they would have been able to play together, and he would have stayed by her side for a longer time. She blamed herself for being completely ignorant of politics. If she had not been so, perhaps they would have had more topics to talk about, and they would be able to discuss the future of Etruria together. She blamed herself for not being prettier. If she had been more attractive in a mature sort of way, perhaps he would have found it easier to relax around her, to be less distant with her, to smile.

She blamed herself for trying to make him smile.

If she had not done so, perhaps, then, she would not have fallen in love with him.

Drying her eyes, she strode to the mirror. An orange-haired girl with pink ribbons and a green dancing costume stared back sullenly at her, eyes rimmed with red. She could almost hear her troupe leader screaming at her in exasperation. _Smile, Lalum, smile! Are you going to let yourself be defeated by this bit of discomfort?_

She doubted that she was merely facing a "bit of discomfort" now. It was searing inside her, a freshly opened wound seeping with pus and poison and blood.

The clear, high-pitched laughs of her troupe leader echoed in her head, almost tinted with derision. _Oh, Lalum! I would have expected better of you. Surely you aren't going to let yourself be defeated by _imaginary_ pain now, are you?_

It's not imaginary, she thought stubbornly.

_My dear girl, of course it is. It's all in your mind. You aren't suffering from a wound, you aren't suffering from internal bleeding—_

—well, it certainly feels like it, she countered.

_Don't interrupt me! You are perfectly hale and hearty, physically at least; don't listen to those signals your brain and your heart are giving you now. The pain is a hallucination. Put it aside, lock it and bury it somewhere, and smile._

I don't want to, she said defiantly.

_You don't have a choice, girl. Have you forgotten who you are? You are a lowly street dancer, and you don't have any say over your emotions—at least, those that are displayed on your face. Stop being so willful. Come! Smile!_

Hesitantly, she tried to lift the corners of her lips, which felt as though they had been immobilized by a thick cake of plaster.

The girl in the mirror smiled back at her.

And the smile stayed.

* * *

_The performer is a pretender, a deceiver; behind her smile, there is no true joy._

It was kind of strange, really, to burst in halfway through the celebrations, but she did it anyway.

She passed a sweeping glance at the guests; there were many familiar faces, many whom she recognized to be part of Roy's Alliance Army last year. Roy himself was there too, looking as respectable and wise and any of the older lords.

Many of the guests face her curious stares as she passed, but she ignored them; instead, she searched the hall for the bride and the groom, who were probably going around greeting some of the more important guests by now.

She found them, finally, with the prince and her father. Her father, the first to see her approach, started slightly before giving her a somewhat encouraging smile, causing the others to turn around.

"Prince Mildain. General Cecilia. General Percival. Father. I do apologize for my lateness, for I was…held up," she finished lamely. What else could she have said? Because she was crying over the existence of this wedding? Because she was childish and naïve and thought that she could deny the reality if she did not come?

She blinked away the tears that threatened to spill out from her eyes. _Smile,_ she reminded herself consciously. _You are here to give them your blessings. You've shelved those emotions already. If you really love him, you should be happy for him, not pine over the loss of some fantasy that never existed to begin with. _

"General Cecilia, General Percival. I wish the two of you happiness." She longed for those words to be sincere, wished that she had truly felt that way, wanted her smile to be an honest reflection of how she was feeling; but she could not, and she hated herself for being so selfish, so spiteful, so false. But they thanked her anyway, seeing nothing wrong with her smile, oblivious to what she was hiding behind that smile, returning it with serene expressions of heartfelt gratitude. She felt so inadequate, almost deceptive, standing there with that huge forced smile and saying words that were not hers—all the more reasons, she thought, why he would never reciprocate her feelings. She was a mere performer and a liar, disguising her emotions with a seemingly genuine—_performed_—smile.

She turned to leave, but the prince stopped her. _Surely you would not leave before giving us one of your dances first, Lalum, _he said, taking out his lyre.

She didn't refuse. After all, it was her duty as a performer, and the only thing she could do well.

But still not well enough to make him smile.

She danced anyway. It was as though every single one of her cells were screaming in protest, conjuring up hallucinations of pain, of something inside her slowly devouring her heart, her lungs, writhing inside her, shredding her insides deliberately and slowly, but she danced anyway. The smile on her face had long been frozen there, etched in stone, independent of her thoughts, her pain, her being. For that was how she had been trained.

Her heart was bleeding freely now; the searing, stinging feeling intensified by a hundredfold, threatening to kill her any moment, but her smile remained resolutely on her face, unaffected, unfeeling, even after the song was ended and after she had finished her dance.

Everyone clapped; she was too fatigued to bother to discern if they were merely being polite. The pain was still growing, and she longed to get away from the damned place as quickly as possible; after all, she had finished what she had come here for, hadn't she? She curtseyed, feeling her knees wobble and weaken, almost failing her, before turning to walk away resolutely, willing herself to put it all away, to put it all behind her, like her father had said.

And all of a sudden, it did not seem like a very hard thing to do.

She was weary; so very tired and drained from the dance, from all the pain, she would love nothing better than to simply forget all about it, to place all these things beyond her reckoning.

As if to answer her wish, a cold, unfeeling numbness came over her; the sky was falling away, and the ground was coming up to meet her, so very enticing and welcoming. There was a strange buzz of noises around her now, of distant voices and indistinct murmurs of surprise or shock, but she paid no heed to them. Someone—was it her father?—seemed to be shouting her name, but she was too exhausted to answer. The voices grew fainter and fainter, and they, too, seemed to be falling away from her, muffled by an invisible barrier.

She hit the cold, hard ground, but she could not feel the impact; it seemed to her like a warm, soft and fluffy bed, so very comfortable that she never wanted to get up from it again. And she didn't.

She was still smiling.

* * *

**A/N**: I warned about the melodrama of the ending. Truth is, the plot bunny ran away from me halfway through; that's why the ending is so crappy.

And I don't think it's actually possible to die of a heartbreak, so I don't think Lalum actually died in the end. But it's up to you to interpret.


End file.
